"I think it'll be one of these winters: For a week, you have temperatures in the teens and 20s and it's snowing like crazy. Then you have a week in the 40s and 50s," said Scott Hetsko, chief meteorologist at WROC-TV (Channel 8). "We're going to have an up-and-down temperature pendulum swing this winter."

In the next few weeks, the Rochester region likely will experience one of those downward swings. Borisoff said there are indications that development of relatively high pressure over the Arctic could send the jet stream, and accompanying pool of frigid polar air, swinging south through this part of the country.

"What we're starting to see is the potential for some colder air moving into the region, particularly in January," she said.

Fierce cold-air invasions a year ago were ascribed to this same "polar vortex," a term that became, as Borisoff put it, "the buzzword of last winter.

"The polar vortex is nothing new. Here in the Northeast, this is something we deal with. We do get arctic outbreaks occasionally," she said.

But guidance from the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center, on which Borisoff and other observers rely, suggest the cold-air outbreaks will be nowhere near as severe or as frequent as last winter and will, as Hetsko said, be tempered by thaws and warm spells.

The Climate Prediction Center has placed upstate New York and most neighboring states in the "even chance" category for temperatures — another way of saying its experts see nothing that will cause our winter to be, on balance, abnormally warm or cold.

Precipitation is a slightly different story.

The prediction center shows the western tip of New York in a zone that might be due to receive below-normal precipitation this winter. The eastern tip of New York, conversely, is part of a zone where above-average precip is possible.

The explanation is El Niño, a cyclical rise in sea temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Niño events tend to send frequent rainstorms across the southern United States and then up the Atlantic Coast. If those storms travel far enough north along the coast, they can impact New York.

The prediction center believes an El Niño event is likely to commence in the coming weeks, though they expect it to be relatively weak.